What is Amazon Associates?

Amazon Associates in quite simply the affiliate program for Amazon, for those of you not familiar with Amazon (doubt very few of you are), Amazon is the leading, most popular e-commerce store in the world! In short they have a HUGE selection of products to promote and a wide variety of categories to choose from.

They’re basically an affiliate marketers dream, you’re given access to this huge selection of products giving you free range on what you can promote.

If it’s sporting goods, they got it, electronics, they got it, beauty products, they got it! I think you get the point. You get free range to all these products for free, no charge whatsoever.

Now let’s get into this Amazon Associates Review since you’re all caught up| Short Review

Clearly I’m a fan of Amazon Associates, but I’m not the only one there are thousands of people all across the nation making full time incomes using their program!

They have a established brand

They offer a huge selection of products

They offer decent commissions

People trust Amazon (I’ll get into how this is beneficial later, but it is, VERY)

They’re an amazing resource for affiliates online across all categories, and accept almost everyone, no lengthy forms to fill out, just some info on yourself and payment information to get you set up.

Why not a perfect 100? You’ll notice above I used the term “decent” when describing their commissions, that’s because they’re not exactly the highest paying affiliate program out there.

Their commissions can run anywhere from 1 – 10% purely depending on the product but on average around 6% commission for each item sold.

Additional Information

When you sign up as an affiliate for Amazon you will be required to agree to an Operating Agreement, basically describing to you their terms and regulations you should follow, along with their reasoning for their commission rates.

(Basically outlying what is expected of you and how their program is set up.)

A little more about the Amazon Associate Program

I first came across Amazon Associates in my early stages of searching for ways to make some extra cash online with a site I had running and Amazon seemed like an obvious contender.

You might be here because you’re looking to do the same or maybe you’ve heard of ways people make money with amazon and you want in on your piece of the pie, whatever your reason is lets just get right into it.

Getting set up with Amazon Associates

Like I mentioned earlier getting set up isn’t all that difficult. The entire process shouldn’t take any longer then ten minutes, the only lengthy part of the enrollment (once accepted) will be getting your payment and tax information set up, but Amazon will guide you through this process to ensure it goes by easy.

Since you will be and essentially are a partner with Amazon once enrolled they want to ensure you are a reasonable applicant, so they do have some guidelines for who can be apart of their program.

Are directed toward children under 13 years of age, as defined by the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act (15 U.S.C. §§ 6501-6506) and any regulations promulgated thereunder

Include any trademark of Amazon or its affiliates, or a variant or misspelling of a trademark of Amazon or its affiliates, in any domain name, subdomain name, or in any username, group name, or other identifier on any social networking site (see the Trademark Guidelines for examples)

Otherwise violate intellectual property rights

These would be essential reasons as to why a site would get declined, but for most if you have a semi-developed website with a privacy policy and a disclosure you shouldn’t have any trouble getting in.

Commission Rates $$$ | What to expect

So now you would have gone through the enrollment process, got accepted, and now you’re in, now on to what products to promote.

What you decide to promote is purely up to you and your choice of direction for your site or platform you will be promoting off of. An essential piece of information to know is what to expect back once you’re promoting, how much of your slice of the pie going to be per sale?

Amazon’s commissions per department rage anywhere from 1% all the way up to 10% commission per sale, so the products you decide to promote can really have an effect on the amount you earn.

This one of the two commission structures Amazon has for their affiliate program. Fixed categories are commissions that well fixed, they remain constant and do not increase or decrease on the amount of sells you make, so choose wisely.

The following table is Amazon’s second commission structure for their general products, so any other products then those mentioned above that Amazon doesn’t pay advertising fees for.

The structure is as simple as the chart, it’s like a pay it forward type of thing, the more sales you make for Amazon the higher the commission you’ll get per sale.

An important thing to note about this structure, is that this is a monthly cumulative structure, meaning the number will reset every month back at 4%.

So if you sell 700 products in one month and are up to 8% per sale, when the month ends and the next month starts you will be set back to a commission of 4% per sale, not continuing from 8% like you had the month prior.

Your Opportunities to Promote on Amazon

You’re not just given the title of the larges eCommerce store in the world for no reason, Amazon has the products to back it up. they sell over 200 million products in the USA alone!

Having over 20 million in sports, 5 million in clothing, and 4 million in office products, and that’s just a fraction of what’s available!

That’s an absolute surplus of opportunities for you in this program, you can promote almost anything!

With almost every product on Amazon you are given the opportunity to search and find a link for almost any of their products for you to promote once you’re on the inside, making the leg work on your end that much less.

You just type in what you’re looking for and Amazon will pull up all the available products with links to sell for these products.

Brand Recognition & Buyers Trust

As I mentioned earlier one of the greatest benefits or “perks” of Amazon’s affiliate program (Amazon Associates) is their brand recognition and buyers trust.

What I mean by this is a simple as I describe it, people trust Amazon, they’ve established a reputable brand name that most companies spend millions in advertising to establish in the sight of the public.

Amazon.com earned the highest reputation in this year’s Harris Poll, edging out not only Apple but also companies like Google (GOOG), Disney (DIS), and Johnson & Johnson (JNJ). According to Harris, Amazon holds the most emotional appeal, provides the best products and services, and is the most trusted company in the U.S.

Not only is having a trusted place to refer buyers to a huge plus, this can also be a huge plus for your conversion rates (sales you make) also.

Since most people are familiar with Amazon and trust them as an seller, they tend to convert a lot easier then most unfamiliar affiliate programs out there.

Think about it, have you ever been on a website, clicked the link and got routed to a seller or place to buy you’ve never heard of, you probably feel uneasy about it so you just look up the product elsewhere and buy it.

No matter how great you are at selling a product, if the buyer feels uneasy or doesn’t trust the seller, you’re not getting a sale and all that work was for nothing.

Final Verdict on Amazon Associates

I would highly recommend this program to those first starting out or those looking for a dependable affiliate program for their online sites or businesses.

Things I liked

Program isn’t difficult to get accepted into, and has an easy guided enrollment for beginners

Has a huge selection of products to promote

Has a great pay it forward program with rising commissions to compensate you for large amounts of sales

Has a trusted well known brand to help with conversions for your referrals

Things I didn’t like

The commissions are typically low starting off, to really take advantage of this program you would have to be promoting higher priced products or be selling a large quantity monthly to get increased commissions.

Overall

Like I said earlier this is a great program for those looking for a wider selection or products to promote on their sites/selling platforms, or for those just starting off.

It’s easy, and you can be up and running in a matter of minutes, so really, there’s nothing to lose, if anything it’s a great resource to have in case you can’t find a specific program that promotes a product, most likely Amazon will have it.

Before you go…

If you need some help getting your first site set up to sell, how you could find some more affiliate programs, or just frankly make money online, go give my Wealthy Affiliate review a quick read.

The gave me all the necessary tools and training I needed to get to where I am today running successful online businesses (like this one!). They taught me everything from easy website development to finding affiliate programs. and creating content that not only ranked in google, but was engaging for my readers.

You can go give it a good read by clicking the link above or the banner below, hopefully they can give you the tools you need to start your successful online business like they did me.

If you have any questions or comments, or even have your own personal personal Amazon Associates review you would like to share, feel free to comment in the comment section below, I would love to hear it!

P.S. We have a serious Taco Bell addiction and the affiliate links on our site lets us order off the dollar menu. Thanks for your support!

About The Author

Tyler

An ex-broke college student turned online business owner, Tyler is a regular poster on Broke College Solutions. Usually taking a more creative approach to making money while in college he is our go-to guy for making money online.

Really great review on Amazon associates. I have to admit Amazon is not my favorite affiliate program, purely because, as you stated, the commissions are really low and if you live outside the US the payment is rather late. On the other hand as you have mentioned here it has great brand recognition and just about every online shopper has an account with them. Thanks for the thorough review, I learned a few extra things

Glad you took a few things from it! Definaetly with every good program does has its downside but I always love to refer it to my beginners starting off, it’s a great program to get their feet a little wet and easy to use.

Hey Tyler,
This is a really timely review, I’ve been considering on becoming an Amazon Affiliate for some time now but never took the opportunity to learn.

My website is almost 2 years old and believe it or not, I’ve procrastinating that entire time! Such huge opportunity, I can’t wait to get started and become an affiliate. Thanks so much for writing this article man, you’r a life saver.

Hey Tyler
I am glad I stumbled across your site. It is so cool that college students can actually pay their own way through college by going on the internet and making their own money. I’d like to suggest that you drop out of college and start blogging full time. I only went to 8th grade and have no college degree whatsoever. My business on the internet actually doesn’t require a degree of any kind. But it does require training. which isn’t to hard to find. Torrey

I really like how easy it is to set up. The fact that they offer such a variety of products it leads to the customer buying other products of what they were specifically looking for. The only downside to the Amazon associate program is the low commission percentage we get. I love it though, I promote most of my products through them.